The last invention that biological evolution needed to make—the neocortex—is inevitably leading to the last invention that humanity needs to make—truly intelligent machines—and the design of one is inspiring the other. Biological evolution is continuing but technological evolution is moving a million times faster than the former. According to the

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A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. During World War II, tens of thousands of people might perish in a battle, and if the public could see it

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The reality, as we have seen, is that machines can be designed using these same principles. Learning the specific design paradigms of nature’s most intelligent entity—the human brain—is precisely the purpose of the brain reverse-engineering project. It is also not true that biological systems are completely “holistic,” as Denton puts it, nor,

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I cannot say that Allen and similar critics would necessarily have been convinced by the arguments I made in that book, but at least he and others could have responded to what I actually wrote. Allen argues that “the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR)…is not a physical law.” I would point out that most scientific laws are not physical laws, but

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My core thesis, which I call the law of accelerating returns (LOAR), is that fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories, belying the conventional wisdom that “you can’t predict the future.” There are still many things—which project, company, or technical standard will prevail in the marketplace,

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What I believe will actually happen is that we will continue on the path of the gradual replacement and augmentation scenario until ultimately most of our thinking will be in the cloud. My leap of faith on identity is that identity is preserved through continuity of the pattern of information that makes us us. Continuity does allow for continual

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My own leap of faith is that I believe that humans have free will, and while I act as if that is the case, I am hard pressed to find examples among my own decisions that illustrate that. Consider the decision to write this book—I never made that decision. Rather, the idea of the book decided that for me. In general, I find myself captive to ideas

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Dr. Wolfram’s primary thesis is that the world is one big class IV cellular automaton. The reason that his book is titled A New Kind of Science is because this theory contrasts with most other scientific laws. If there is a satellite orbiting Earth, we can predict where it will be five years from now without having to run through each moment of a

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So how exactly does a human differ from Watson, such that we ascribe free will to the human but not to the computer program? We can identify several factors. Even though Watson is a better Jeopardy! player than most if not all humans, it is nonetheless not nearly as complex as a human neocortex. Watson does possess a lot of knowledge, and it does

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